HDCP Compliant 7600GT and 7900GTs in time for HD-DVD and Windows Vista

ATI has received a lot of bad press in the past for claims
of HDCP compliancy when its X1000 series of graphics cards lacked it. This
enraged a group of users filed a class action law suit against ATI. NVIDIA was in a much better position as it is a chip manufacturer and
doesn’t make its own boards nor was there HDCP compliancy advertised all over
product boxes and manufacturer websites.While ATI and NVIDIA GPUs have support for HDCP, a separate chip that
stores decoding keys is required to output a fully HDCP compliant video signal.

Since the whole ordeal of HDCP compliancy started, add-in
board manufacturers are beginning to add HDCP decoding keys to products.
One of the manufacturers with HDCP compliant cards on display at Computex 2006
is MSI. MSI has two NVIDIA based HDCP compliant cards on display -- a 7900GT and
7600GT. Both cards boast dual DVI output and HDCP compliance but it’s unknown
if both DVI outputs can output an HDCP compliant signal or if only one output
is compliant.

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What does HDCP have anything to do with your graphics cards? Why would you need to copy protect the images on your screen? If you are playing a movie, your playback software needs the decoding keys, not the graphics card.

The only case I can think of is if you have an monitor or TV hooked up to the DVI that will not accept images unless they are HDCP. Do devices like that exist?

Unless you are somehow streaming the protected data directly off the HD-DVD, bypassing your system, and going directly to the TV via your graphics card would you need your graphics card to support HDCP.

The whole point of HDCP is end to end copy protection, so the hardware has to support it from the VGA card to the monitor or from the Blu-ray player to the Plasma TV etc. There are get outs (ICT) for analogue HD outputs, but they are implemented at the media level and even though there’s a lot of noise at the moment about ICT being switched off initially, there’s nothing stopping the studios from changing their minds at any time about this.

ther problem is studios will include copy portection along with the ICT eventually, which is just way over the top, also since no-one rips movies directly via the DVI port, but instead the ripping software acts like a player, using decryption algorythms created by DVD-Jon, to copy the movie while the movie plays at very high speed.